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   Vol.66/No.7            February 18, 2002 
 
 
Conquest of power poses need to advance culture
(Books of the Month column)
 
Printed below is an excerpt from Problems of Everyday Life by Leon Trotsky, one of Pathfinder's Books of the Month for February. The book includes articles on social and cultural issues in the struggle to create the foundations for a new society, written for the Soviet press in the years immediately following the October 1917 socialist revolution in Russia. Topics covered range from art, religion, science, and cinema to the education of youth and the emancipation of women. The item quoted is taken from the chapter titled "Not by politics alone," and was first published in Pravda on July 10, 1923. Copyright © 1973 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

BY LEON TROTSKY
Not by politics alone. This simple thought should be thoroughly grasped and borne in mind by all who speak or write for propaganda purposes. Changed times bring changed tunes. The prerevolutionary history of our party was a history of revolutionary politics. Party literature, party organizations--everything was ruled by politics in the direct and narrow sense of that word. The revolutionary crisis has intensified political interests and problems to a still greater degree. The party had to win over the most politically active elements of the working class. At present the working class is perfectly aware of the fundamental results of the revolution. It is quite unnecessary to go on repeating over and over the story of these results. It does not any longer stir the minds of the workers, and is more likely even to wipe out in the workers' minds the lessons of the past. With the conquest of power and its consolidation as a result of the civil war, our chief problems have shifted to the needs of culture and economic reconstruction. They have become more complicated, more detailed and in a way more prosaic. Yet, in order to justify all the past struggle and all the sacrifices, we must learn to grasp these fragmentary problems of culture, and solve each of them separately.

Now, what has the working class actually gained and secured for itself as a result of the revolution?

1. The dictatorship of the proletariat (represented by the workers' and peasants' government under the leadership of the Communist Party).

2. The Red Army--a firm support of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

3. The nationalization of the chief means of production, without which the dictatorship of the proletariat would have become a form void of substance.

4. The monopoly of foreign trade, which is the necessary condition of socialist state structure in a capitalist environment.

These four things, definitely won, form the steel frame of all our work; and every success we achieve in economics or culture--provided it is a real achievement and not a sham--becomes in this framework a necessary part of the socialist structure.

And what is our problem now? What have we to learn in the first place? What should we strive for? We must learn to work efficiently: accurately, punctually, economically. We need culture in work, culture in life, in the conditions of life. After a long preliminary period of struggle we have succeeded in overthrowing the rule of the exploiters by armed revolt. No such means exists, however, to create culture all at once. The working class must undergo a long process of self-education, and so must the peasantry, either along with the workers or following them. Lenin speaks about this shift in focus of our aims and efforts in his article on cooperation:

We have to admit [he says] that there has been a radical modification in our whole outlook on socialism. The radical modification is this: formerly we placed, and had to place, the main emphasis on the political struggle, on revolution, on winning political power, etc. Now the emphasis is changing and shifting to peaceful, organizational, "cultural" work. I should say that emphasis is shifting to educational work, were it not for our international relations, were it not for the fact that we have to fight for our position on a world scale. If we leave that aside, however, and confine ourselves to internal economic relations, the emphasis in our work is certainly shifting to education. ["On Cooperation," in Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. 33 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1966)]...
 
 
'Teach every soldier to read and write'
Nothing, therefore, but the problems of our international position keeps us, as Lenin tells us, from the struggle for culture. Now these problems, as we shall see presently, are not altogether of a different order. Our international position largely depends on the strength of our self-defense--that is to say, on the efficiency of the Red Army--and, in this vital aspect of our existence as a state, our problem consists almost entirely of work for culture: we must raise the level of the army and teach every single soldier to read and to write. The men must be taught to read books, to use manuals and maps; they must acquire habits of tidiness, punctuality, and thrift. It cannot be done all at once by some miraculous means. After the civil war and during the transitional period of our work, attempts were made to save the situation by a specially invented "proletarian military doctrine," but it was quite lacking in any real understanding of our actual problems. The same thing happened in regard to the ambitious plan for creating an artificial "proletarian culture."1 All such quests for the philosophers' stone combine despair at our deficiency in culture with a faith in miracles. We have, however, no reason to despair, and as to miracles and childish quackeries like "proletarian culture" or "proletarian military doctrine," it is high time to give such things up. We must see to the development of culture within the framework of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and this alone can assure the socialist content of the revolutionary conquests. Whoever fails to see this will play a reactionary part in the development of party thought and party work.

When Lenin says that at the present moment our work is less concerned with politics than with culture, we must be quite clear about the terms he uses, so as not to misinterpret his meaning. In a certain sense politics always ranks first. Even the advice of Lenin to shift our interests from politics to culture is a piece of political advice. When the labor party of a country comes to decide that at some given moment the economic problem and not the political should take first place, the decision itself is political. It is quite obvious that the word "politics" is used here in two different meanings: firstly, in a wide materialist and dialectical sense, as the totality of all guiding principles, methods, systems that determine collective activities in all domains of public life; and, on the other hand, in a restricted sense, specifying a definite part of public activity, directly concerned with the struggle for power and opposed to economic work, to the struggle for culture, etc. Speaking of politics as concentrated economics, Lenin meant politics in the wider philosophic sense. But when he urged: "Let us have less politics and more economics," he referred to politics in the restricted and special sense. Both ways of using the word are sanctioned by tradition and are justified.


 
1. Trotsky's discussion of disputes over "proletarian military doctrine" will be found in his Military Writings (Pathfinder Press, 1971), and his discussion of "proletarian culture" will be found in Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor, 1960).  
 
 
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